Week 68

Hello, it’s been a while.

I arrived back from my holiday on Monday afternoon, a bit later than I was supposed to. My journey home was pretty awful. I’ve started writing some things up about my time away. I’ll try and get them up here soon.

I’ve done a lot of talking this week. I spent a little while catching up. I’ve also been breaking down some of our future stories into more manageable pieces of work. We’re planning to start work to allow browse sections and specialist sectors to be created in a draft state, so that content designers can tag content to the page before it appears on GOV.UK. We’re also looking at redesigning specialist browse pages to focus on curated lists of content, so I’ve been thinking about how curated lists (and tools to create them) could live in our publishing platform.

On Friday, I went along to the latest round of user research, down in the lab, where we were testing the new mainstream browse design. We took a different approach to testing this time. Rather than sitting down and talking with the user throughout, we actually gave users a list of about twenty tasks to complete on their own, observing how they used browse to find their way there. For the first time in our lab, we used eye tracking to see where users were looking on the page.

I’ve made some changes to Situation Room Dashboard this week, to support rooms like the lab which have a formal booking process. These rooms operate on an ‘in use’/'not in use’ model, rather than the existing 'available’/'not available’ concept. In addition, on Thursday and Friday I installed Hudl tablets outside 7 meeting rooms in the office, to show what’s happening in each room.

And finally, on Wednesday evening, I started building a view of all our mission patches at GDS. So far, I’ve made a prototype and started working on some code.